Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian--even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been "gh...osted"Mor made to seem invisible--by culture itself.... Once the lesbian has been defined as ghostly--the better to drain her of any sensual or moral authority--she can then be exorcised.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

...I am an outsider, a lesbian, a shikse. The Jewish community is not my community. But as a Jew--as a Jew in a Christian, anti-Se...mitic society--the Jewish community is, and will always remain, my community. Enemy and ally.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

... dealing with being a lesbian--and part of that is by being politically activist--has caused me to have a less carefree adolesc...ence. But I don't think that's a bad thing. It has its rewards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or ind...irect attack on the male right of access to women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

False history gets made all day, any day,the truth of the new is never on the news...False history gets written every day...the lesbian archaeologist watches herselfsifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing,asking the clay all questions but her own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

As a writer, I must be free to say what is in all the diversity I can command. I regret the distorting prejudices that surround me..., whether they affect homosexuals or men or the physically handicapped and I can't alone defeat them. They will not defeat me, either as a lesbian or a writer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Then the question began to live under my blankets: How did lesbianism begin? What were the symptoms? The public library gave infor...mation on the finished lesbian--and that woefully sketchy--but on the growth of a lesbian, there was nothing. I did discover that the difference between hermaphrodites and lesbians was that hermaphrodites were "born that way." It was impossible to determine whether lesbians budded gradually, or burst into being with a suddenness that dismayed them as much as it repelled society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I used to like this town.... Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peacefu...l.... Now ... we've got the big money, the sharpshooters, the percentage workers, the fast dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit--and Cleveland. We've got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riff-raff of a big hardboiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »